Medway film Pubmonkey swings onto streaming
Plus the Zigzag Scrap Store, Spinout Nuggets take over Analogue Music, we review Hollywood Bowl, our weekly events guide, and more
A film partly inspired by and shot in Medway has found its way to streaming via Amazon Prime Video, so we chat with the writer to find out more. Further down, we learn about the new Zig Zag Scrap Store, where creatives can pick up and reuse discarded materials, record label Spinout Nuggets taking over Analogue Music, review the Hollywood Bowl, have our weekly events guide, and more.
Medway film Pubmonkey swings onto streaming
Pubmonkey is a crime comedy film written by Jamie O’Hara and partly based on characters he met in the Medway Towns. Made in 2014, it is now available to watch on Amazon Prime. We spoke to Jamie to find out more about the film…
Pubmonkey, a film written by Jamie O’Hara and directed by his cousin Jean-Claude Deguara, was released in 2015. It is based on an unpublished manuscript Jamie had written for a novel. “It's sort of based around characters from the Medway Towns and the South London area.” It is a “kidnap, damsel in distress story, with lots of profanity, drug use and other things that made it quite hard to get distributed.”
Pubmonkey is a term I had never heard before, and even the usually reliable Urban Dictionary was unfamiliar with the phrase. Jamie explains that it is somebody who entertains people in pubs for drinks. “Eddie starts working for a building firm, based on some lads I worked with in the early 90s in Strood called the Burts.”
Like the character of Eddie in the film, Jamie was not very good at labouring, but he was good at making them laugh after work in the pub, “like a performing pub monkey.” In the film, Eddie meets Bingo, a character played entertainingly by Jamie himself. “He was based on an absolute head case I lived with on Boundary Road. He was a debt collector and was far more terrifying than the character portrayed. He was unhinged.”
Jamie would find himself being dragged out of bed and taken out collecting debts around Chatham and Gillingham. Like the character of Eddie, Jamie didn’t feel he had any discernible talent other than making an idiot of himself. Within the film, the character of Bingo is a highlight, and Jamie portrays him well, including a scene where he is taking part in a historical reenactment at Rochester Castle. When Jean told Jamie he wanted him to play Bingo, Jamie originally was against the idea. “No, he's massive.” However, Jamie tells me that Jean thought, “It'll be funny because you are quite scrawny.”
Jamie says that he and his cousin are more like siblings, and they often fell out a lot during pre-production. This resulted in the script being overly developed, going through “hundreds of iterations,” leading to tonal shifts and imbalances within the final film. However, Jamie did like the attention to detail. “I was visiting the set, I think it was second day they were shooting, and I thought, ‘Wow, they've got the CDs right, they've got the PlayStation games right.’”
Outside of writing and co-starring in this film, Jamie has worked with visual effects in films and recently has worked on a show for NBC in the US. “I made dinosaurs, which was hilarious. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say because the show hasn't come out yet.” Jean also works in visual effects, including on Doctor Who and the Harry Potter films. “He's always wanted to direct.” Jamie tells me about Jean, “and he was making a few short films.” Jamie had been writing for some time and had a set of short stories about Medway published called Dead Birds and Dodgy Geezers in the 90s.
Jamie’s family moved to Medway from Ireland in the 1960s and it was Jean who encouraged Jamie to write the feature script. They decided to make the film in true DIY style. “It's a family movie. My old man's in it, my mum's in it, my aunt, everyone, the whole family.” Originally the story was called ‘My Ass and Other Secrets.’ “I wrote it pretty much straight after I'd had the short stories published in the mid-90s, and I had some interest from publishers,” but then Jamie went to America and did no more with the novel. “Jean-Claude was constantly going to me, ‘Send it to me, I want to see if we can do it.’”
Jamie found the adaptation process difficult, with elements he thought essential being cut. “We didn’t want it to be a long film, around 90 minutes.” Jamie started writing the script in 2002 and worked on it for about ten years. “We argued, essentially, until we went into pre-production. I think we fell out again afterwards because I didn't really like the distributors he was talking to out in LA.” The film was made without financing. “We had a book called ‘The Guerilla Filmmakers Handbook,’” an essential guide to low-budget filmmaking. Jamie is also friends with Mark Price, who made the ultra-low budget Zombie film ‘Colin,’ who provided insights and support.
The film also has an original soundtrack written and performed by Medway’s Len Price 3. “We'd had a holding soundtrack. As soon as we started looking into how much it cost to license all this stuff, it became massively self-evident that that weren't going to be able.” Jamie went to the Tap ‘n’ Tin. “I'd seen the Len Price 3 play there and was blown away by them,” so Jamie contacted them. “I really liked what Glenn did with little vignettes, they sort of fitted in with the way the story was written”. They took a rough cut of the film to Jim Riley’s Ranscombe Studios and did a live recording of the soundtrack whilst the film played on a big screen.
During the many iterations of the film script, various plot details were suggested and changed. In the final version, Eddie’s girlfriend and a work colleague are kidnapped by drug dealers when she won’t reveal the location of drugs they think she has. “There was one point where you go sort of mad with the changes,” including “let's not have drugs in it” to “let's make it about a stolen painting” and then “it becomes awful.”
A low-budget trap they tripped up on was filming without permission on the London Underground, leading the film to not be released for a long time. “We'd not covered up or replaced any brand logos. We had to do a lot of paintouts. I had to send some really manipulative emails to TfL to try and keep those scenes in, but we got away with it.” Jamie estimates they spent around £2,000 on the film, obtained from family and friends. Jamie cycles between thinking the film is “a glorified home movie because it is family and is shot by us on the hoof at whatever location we get” and recognising that “it's more than that because it did involve hundreds of people who gave their time out of the kindness of their heart.”
As noted earlier, there are tonal changes from outright comedy to dark violence, including violence to a female character, which can be difficult to watch. “I think you can blame me on that. I wanted to make them (the drug dealers) more terrifying. I'd been reading a lot of Irvine Welsh.” Jamie admits “it goes all over the place,” though that is not always a result of the script changes. “That was kind of deliberate”. It also represents the cast and crew becoming confident with the material with ‘Nil by Mouth’ moments and pieces of levity. “But because it's not shot linear, it drops about a bit. I think we were happy with that. I think we liked the idea because it's about boozing.” In the original script, the story is a lot darker as the story goes “quite horribly wrong very quickly.”
They organised a low-budget tour of the film in 2015, including at Sun Pier House, where they would screen the film, followed by the Len Price 3 performing songs from the film. “That was how we were promoting it, and that was a really good time”. The film then struggled for years, unable to find distribution. The version that is available now is not the film they toured with. “The guys in LA recut it. Why did they change that? That's unnecessary. But by that point, I kind of washed my hands of it.” Jamie admits, “I wrote the manuscript for it mid to late 90s. Now they could play it backwards for all I care.”
I ask Jamie if he minds talking about the film again after all this time. “It's lovely to talk about it again. It's good memories and stuff. It was our work.”
You can watch Pubmonkey via Amazon Prime Video.
Affordable creative resources at the Zigzag Scrap Store
The Zigzag Scrap Store is a new initiative at Intra Arts in Rochester. We caught up with the CIC’s directors, Xtina Lamb and Alison Patman, to find out about it…
The Zigzag Scrap Store CIC is a creative reuse scheme, part of a network of 120 scrap stores in the UK. “We take surplus items, offcuts, clean waste and offer it up as materials for creative activities, play and DIY,” says Xtina. It's a membership scheme, and they have levels depending on how many people are being collected for. “Usually, it's an annual payment, but there's also a pay as you go option.” The idea is that they provide affordable access to people to the materials and make connections between people in different schemes, like “environmental and creative schemes locally.” There are environmental benefits from materials not going to landfill and materials not being bought new.
Xtina Lamb and Alison Patman are two of three directors of the new organisation, along with Paivi Seppala. Xtina is mostly responsible for “back-end stuff, including memberships and marketing. I’ve also been working on the website.” Launched last year, a lot of time has been spent establishing policies and how the store will work. Alison is on the shop floor most of the time, acting as “front of house when Xtina's not. We share the roles. It's quite nice to catch up and work with each other.”
“It's just a wonderful project to be part of,” says Alison. “It's really nice to see people come in. They're not sure what they want to do, then they see stuff in front of them, and they want to go away and create amazing creative projects”. Alison met Paivi at the Salute to the 40s event at Chatham Historic Dockyard and asked if there was a way to work with her and Xtina. She started by volunteering with Xtina and Medway Fine Printmakers. “Together we had taken on this project,” says Xtina. “It was a little seed of an idea, but I couldn't have done it on my own.”
They did a feasibility study as part of UK Shared Prosperity Fund scheme at the end of 2023 and then got a grant to help develop the idea and make it happen. “In the meantime, we had a basement full of stuff accumulating,” says Xtina. “We did a preliminary event in Medway Open Studios in the summer last year.” They then had open days in December before officially launching in January.
They are donated the materials from a mixture of commercial sources. “There's an upholstery place on Medway City Estate who have been giving us 10 or 20 bags at a time, full of offcuts”. There is a Gravesend business that has provided them with “beautiful artist-prepped plywood.” Where a commercial company has items that would otherwise go to landfill, a good solution is to donate to the scrap store. “Really high on our priorities is finding more sources.” They have also received items from hobbyists who have passed away or given up the hobby. It can be random, with donations including “eight bin bags of Airfix kits.”
The scrap store is in the basement of Intra Arts, a large open space full of material. To become a member, you can walk in and declare your interest, or you can sign up online. Membership starts at £40 a year for hobbyists, with rates also available for families and groups and a pay as you go option. You can find full details of opening hours on their website.
Spinout Nuggets take over Analogue Music
DJ Lee Grimshaw owner of the Spinout Nuggets record label, is taking over Analogue Music on Saturday with his brother Dave Grimshaw. We spoke to Lee to find out more…
Spinout Nuggets is a physical record label providing “the records you didn’t know you needed.” This includes a wide range of Medway-created music, “including our very first release back in February 2018 (Sergeants Mess).” Lee now lives in Cornwall but is originally from Gillingham, moving away thirty years ago. Despite this, he returns to the southeast “most weekends for the last several years for musical happenings.”
On Saturday, Lee and his brother Dave will be playing records at Analogue Music in Rochester. “We both started DJing when we were still in Medway, around the late 80s, even playing on Medway Dance FM. Who remembers that?” Spinout has put on many gigs in the area, including four sold out nights for The Prisoners’ 40th anniversary at the Royal Function Rooms, “a venue much missed.”
Lee is coming to Analogue Music because “Alistair and Hannah have supported the label and local music since they opened the shop, and they’re nice people too.” He tells me that they have a great selection of records in stock, and “there’s not many visits that I walk out empty handed”. He thought it would be nice to give something back, “making some noise for the day.”
Saturday will be a social event as well as a thank you to Alistair and Hannah. Lee and Dave have DJ’ed at various events, “mostly Mod-orientated, we’ll be playing selected records from our collections, mostly 45s, and a good batch of offerings from Spinout Nuggets too.” Lee lists music that has influenced the sounds that Spinout promotes, including 50s/60s R&B, Hammond Jazz, indiepop, Northern Soul, 60s Garage, Mod Garage, Instrumental Madness and “the sounds of Medway, of course.”
The event is free to attend. “It’s a mighty fine record shop, and will only cost the price of a fine record should people see something they like, which I’m sure they will.” Everyone is welcome to visit the shop from noon until 4pm on Saturday, browse the shop’s fine selection of vinyl records and purchase something by artists from Spinout Nuggets. “We'll play one of your records if you do.”
Out for Dinner: Hollywood Bowl in Gillingham
Continuing my occasional series where I hunt for good ribs, I looked online and remembered having a particular dish at the Hollywood Bowl. This is how I ended up at the Hollywood Bowl on Gillingham High Street, not the bowling alley in Medway Valley Park. It is a large, light, and friendly venue, but not like I remembered at all.
I had come here because I knew they served ‘A Real Dog’s Dinner.’ It is chunks of steak, chicken and mushrooms on skewers, a full rack of BBQ ribs, and two sausages. Served in a genuine dog bowl, just because, all for a princely sum.
I sat looking forward to the meal, with fond memories of having this meal in the past. When I saw it, it was exactly as I remembered. The chips were crispy, the sausages were thick, and the skewers were well portioned. The salad was rubbish, but you can’t have everything. That left me with the ribs, and they were cold, which made the fat gristly and the whole thing unappealing. I was the only person in the restaurant. I would have happily waited for good ribs.
For now, I continue to wait for them. If you know anywhere that actually serves good ribs in Medway, please let me know.
Events this week
🎸 Sat 7 Jun - Theatre Royal album launch // Medway jangle poppers launch their new album A Change of Weather. LV21, Chatham. Tickets £10.
🕰️ Sun 8 Jun - Medway Vintage, Antiques and Collectables Fair // Stalls selling antiques, vintage clothing, interiors, vinyl, and lots more. Chatham Historic Dockyard. Entrance £2, free after noon.
More Authority
Earlier this week, our columnist Zahra Barri wrote about the time she spent volunteering with Medway Little Theatre, Rochester’s long-standing amateur dramatics venue.
Over on our sister Kent Current title, we looked at a wild week where Elon Musk style politics came to Kent before disintegrating just as quickly. At the same time, normal democratic functions across the county are being pushed to the wayside.
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